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Ralph N. Kleps Awards

2004

SHARP-Self-Help and Regional Assistance Program: Superior Courts of Butte, Glenn, and Tehama Counties
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A collaborative self-help center focusing on the needs of three rural counties, featuring extensive videoconferencing between counties to extend services to remote areas.

Legal Assistance Center: Superior Court of Calaveras County
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An extensive, community-wide legal assistance center staffed by a small claims advisor, superior court clerk, and family law facilitator, which provides litigants with public computers equipped with access to self-help Web sites and forms.

ACCESS-Assisting Court Customers with Education and Self-Help Services: Superior Court of San Francisco County
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Multi-lingual information and assistance center that provides culturally appropriate services in English, Spanish, Chinese (Cantonese), Russian, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. The emphasis is placed on services for disenfranchised communities that have traditionally been denied access, such as immigrants, dependent adults, and gay and transgendered people.

Gaining Education through Determination (G.E.D.): Superior Court of Yolo County
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The Unified Family Court of Yolo County provides delinquent and dependent minors one-on-one tutoring, books, support, and encouragement to enable them to pass the GED exam, complete high school, and see themselves as valuable citizens.

2003

Night Court for Child Support Calendar: Superior Court, Inyo
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This unique court combines a dedicated child support calendar in a night-court setting that allows working parents to attend court without losing pay. The efficiency and effectiveness of the court are enhanced by parents' increased participation and by the availability of additional resources, such as the Family Law Facilitator.

Visual Guides to the Courts: Superior Court of Siskyou County
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The court produced visual storytelling brochures that walk litigants through eight subject areas of the legal system. To design the brochures so that they incorporate the public's perspective, the court organized seven public forums around the county, collaborated with other agencies and stakeholders in the justice system, and met with representatives of different cultures in the community. The court distributed the guides at courthouses, family resource centers, public health and mental health organizations, hospitals and clinics, schools, nonprofit social service agencies, public libraries, law libraries, law enforcement agencies, and the local bar association as well as in Native American tribal communities. Six of the guides have been translated into Spanish.

Guardianship Facilitation and Outreach: Superior Court of Yolo County
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This guardianship clinic, facilitated by a court staff attorney, assists pro per grandparents and other caretakers in the guardianship process. The goals of the program are to provide permanency for children and their caregivers, prevent parental abuse and neglect, and reduce the trauma and expense of dependency proceedings. The staff attorney and Judge Donna M. Petre, co-presiding judge of Yolo County's Unified Family Court, publicize the guardianship program to government agencies, child protection groups, grandparents' advocates, and other interested organizations. Guardianship petitions have increased by more than 100 percent since the program began in 1999.

Spanish Self-Help Model Program: Superior Court of Fresno County
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Since 1990, the number of Hispanic residents in Fresno County has increased by 48.6 percent, and this group now represents 44 percent of the county's total population. In an effort to provide equal access to all residents, the court's self-help center assists the underserved Spanish pro per litigant population by offering educational information and language assistance. Centro de Recursos Legales provides:

  • Daily access to Spanish language self-help instructions for family law, unlawful detainer, civil harassment, and guardianship issues;
  • Review of legal documents by a court examiner;
  • Access to family law clinics; and
  • In-court interpreter assistance.

EZ Legal File Service Bureau: Superior Court of San Mateo County
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The EZLegalFile Service Bureau is an Internet-based, interactive program that allows litigants to complete Judicial Council forms in family law, small claims, and unlawful detainer cases. The San Mateo court developed the bureau, which is available to any trial court in the state, in response to requests from other courts that wanted to provide the same access to citizens in their counties. To date, 12 superior courts representing more than 20 percent of the state's population have joined the EZLegalFile Service Bureau. As of June 2002, more than 15,000 litigants throughout California have completed their forms using EZLegalFile. In addition, the AOC recently awarded the San Mateo court a grant to expand the number of EZLegalFile partner courts to 24.

Tip of the Day Radio Program: Superior Court of Ventura County
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The Tip of the Day program consists of five-minute live public-service radio announcements in Spanish Monday through Friday at 10:30 a.m. on KOXR, a Spanish-language radio station. The court started the program in mid 2002 as a way to promote the court's no-cost self-help legal access centers. Topics are chosen from questions that have previously been raised by people seeking help at the centers. Each tip is intended to provide general information to the community while also informing citizens of the wide range of services and programs offered by the court. Since the program was implemented, the number of people seeking assistance at the self-help legal access center in La Colonia, the predominately Spanish-speaking neighborhood of Oxnard, has more than doubled.

I-CAN Interactive Community Assistance Network: Superior Court of Orange County
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The project, implemented in 2000 in partnership with the Legal Aid Society of Orange County, is a network of Web-based legal services and interactive kiosks that assist self-represented litigants. I-CAN!'s multilingual, interactive, and tutorial modules enable self-represented litigants to create properly formatted pleadings and complete legal forms using a touchscreen or Web interface. Users are able to obtain immediate technical assistance from Legal Aid staff by using Internet phone technology that has been integrated into the system. Currently, the Orange County court has 13 modules that are available in English and Spanish and 5 that offer instruction in Vietnamese. The I-CAN! system is used in nine other counties and is proposed for use in seven others.

Step-by-Step Civil Appellate Manual: Court of Appeal, Fourth Appellate District
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The manual instructs self-represented litigants who are undertaking an appeal in how to proceed in the Fourth Appellate District, Division One. In addition, the appendix provides a wealth of forms and samples. The manual is being used as text in a course on appellate practice given by the San Diego County Public Law Library. It is available in a print version, free of charge, and is on the court's Web site.

2002

Court Community: Teen Parenting: Superior Court of San Benito County
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The Court to Community: Teen Parenting project is an outreach effort designed to inform teenagers about the legal and financial consequences when a child is born and the parents are not living together and not financially independent and/or not yet 18. The objective is to reduce unplanned pregnancies and births where the children of teens become dependent on family members or public assistance.

Public Law Center: Superior Court of Nevada County
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The Public Law Center assists the growing number of self-represented persons involved in the court system and improves access to justice for all members of the community. This legal self-help center provides information to persons who are not represented by an attorney and who may have to navigate through court procedures on a number of legal issues such as adoption, conservatorship, guardianship, name changes, unlawful detainer, traffic, appeals, civil harassment, neighbor disputes, and jury service.

In the Interest of Justice Video: Superior Court of San Joaquin County
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In the Interest of Justice, a cultural awareness video produced by the Superior Court of San Joaquin County with accompanying written materials, seeks to educate both the bench and court staff about the Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese cultures by illustrating how cultural differences can clash in the courtroom. For example, Southeast Asian formalities, such as diverting eyes from people of authority as a way of showing respect, can be misunderstood by American judges and judicial staff.

CLETS Interface: Superior Court of Sonoma County
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The court developed a computer software program to allow automatic electronic transmission of restraining order information from the superior court case management system to the Department of Justice's California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS) automated computer system. Information entered into the state CLETS system is accessible to all law enforcement agencies in the state.

Self-Help Forms Printing Kiosk: Superior Court of Orange County
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The court installed self-service, high-speed kiosks at all seven of the court's justice center locations. The touch-screen kiosk allows the public instant access, at no cost, to all of the court's approximately 575 preprinted forms for civil, small claims, family law, probate, and criminal matters. Each time a user selects a form, the kiosk accesses the California Courts Web site for the statewide form as well as the local court's public Web server for local forms. This ensures that the user sees and prints the latest version of the form.

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